Old newspaper clipping reading: Would a Woman Make a Good President? I suppose it was only a willingness to indulge in flattering pleasantry that led a distinguished jurist (Justice Brewer), when lately addressing a large audience of young women at one of our prominent female colleges, to intimate that within the present generation the suffrage might be extended to women in every State, and to excited the enthusiastic applause of his emotional hearers by the hint that before they became grey-haired there might 'sit in the White House a woman who, like Queen Victoria, will shed lustre upon this country as Victoria shed lustre upon England' - Ex-President Cleveland. Discussed by the Following Women of Boston Who Have Engaged in Professions and Business. Mrs. Alice Parker Lesser, Lawyer. Mrs. Elizabeth C. Keller, Physician, and Trustee of the Children's Institutions Department of Boston. Miss Katherine E. Conway, Editor of the Pilot, and Author. Mrs. Mae D. Frazar, Of the Frazar Touring Co.

Mae D. Frazer, Somerville’s first known female publisher, 1852-1919

ByKaren

As National Women’s History Month draws to a close this week, our spotlight is on Mae Durell Frazar (1852-1919) an accomplished writer, editor, world traveler, and entrepreneur who lived most of her life on or near Prospect Hill.

Frazar is chiefly known as Somerville’s first female publisher. In 1887 she created a 16-sheet paper called The Home Life, which was printed by the Somerville Journal, and “crammed with original matter, illustrated stories, prizes, premiums, music and book reviews, boys’ and girls’ departments, fashions, modes, correspondence, etc.,” according to a story in the Journal that year. She reportedly garnered a circulation of 20,000.

Soon after she started the paper, Frazar launched a European excursion tour business in which she arranged and conducted extended tour packages for travelers. She authored tour guides emphasizing the new affordability of European travel – once a “supreme luxury” – for the average person, and she advertised and reported on her travels in newspapers across the country.

In 1905, Supreme Court Justice David Brewer delivered the commencement address at Vassar College, where he offered a possibility: “Who shall say that before the gray hair shall cover the heads of the women here tonight there may not sit in the White House a woman who will shed luster upon this country as Queen Victoria shed luster upon England?” His comments made quite a buzz in the news of the day, including the Boston Globe, which asked four women “who have engaged in professions and business” to weigh in on whether a woman would make a good President. One of them was Mae Frazar.

While acknowledging that women were at a disadvantage due to their exclusion from participating in political life, Frazar saw the strengths of women as complementary to those of men in conducting public affairs, but wrote that modern views and appropriate education would empower women to take on the Presidency. “Elizabeth made a pretty good hand at Queen, and Victoria was not so bad, so why not?”